Thomas Pascoe worked in both the Lloyd's of London insurance market and in corporate finance before joining the Telegraph. He writes about the financial markets. His email is thomas.pascoe@telegraph.co.uk and his Twitter address is @PascoeTelegraph

Ed Balls is a scoundrel – let’s give him the boot

Labour’s poisonous economic legacy is still the Conservatives’ most potent electoral weapon. Sitting MPs in marginal seats who designed and still support the policies that brought the public finances to the edge of ruin should be targeted relentlessly in 2015. But prospective Tory candidates seem to be running scared.

Two have so far been approached directly to challenge Ed Balls in his Morley and Outwood constituency. The seat was also advertised to approved candidates in December. No one took up the challenge. Alarmingly, at a time when the Conservatives are finalising the list of prospective parliamentary candidates in marginal seats, they have yet to begin candidate selection for the seat that ought to be their main objective.

On the face of it, Morley and Outwood is an ideal opportunity for the Tories. Held by a majority of only 1,101, it would require a swing of around 1 per cent from red to blue to be captured. The party’s election strategy is based on winning the 40 tightest opposition marginals. If it is to succeed, taking Balls’s seat is non-negotiable.

Honour also demands it be taken. This is an opportunity to deny an architect of the financial disaster a further five years of suckling at the public teat. Tories should be queuing up for the opportunity to put Balls to the test. So why aren’t they?

There’s Ukip, for a start. Their vote was sufficient (at 1,505) to deny the Conservative Party the seat in 2010. Lack of accommodation at a national level will see them scrap for every last Tory vote. Add the fact that Balls has the benefit of being Labour’s best television performer (admittedly, not a category over-burdened with talent), and there is a strong advantage for the incumbent.

Another factor is the strong position of the BNP in 2010. The party won 7.2 per cent of the vote, but has since undergone a decline in the national polls, and lost most of its council seats. Its voters tend to come from social groups in which Labour does well. If the BNP vote disintegrates, Balls should be the beneficiary. The electoral terrain is therefore more challenging than it first appears, but then Balls has been more irresponsible than any other Labour frontbencher.

It is the record of both man and party that must be placed before the electorate in 2015. The Conservatives need to force voters to confront the idiocy of Labour’s economic strategy, particularly the belief that economic stimulus can return Britain to growth. The country is forecast to run a net deficit of 6.9 per cent of GDP this financial year (excluding the Royal Mail pension transfer). That is one of the largest stimulus spending programmes in the world. What has it delivered? In all probability, a triple-dip recession.

Even more damagingly, Balls represents two immensely harmful ideas, both of which must be discredited if Britain is to return from the brink financially.

The first is the idea that economics is an immeasurably complex subject that submits only to the finest minds. At present, actions and ideas are presented in a way that deliberately obscures their purpose and effect. Finance thus becomes less of a discipline and more of an alchemist’s trick. Balls has a track record in this nonsense-speak which ranges from the introduction of “neo-classical endogenous growth theory” in a speech he wrote for Gordon Brown, to last year’s talk of “predistribution”. The effect and the intention are identical: these phrases make the nation’s finances more remote, forcing us to acknowledge Balls’s role as an expert and concede our own. From these seeds grew the debt binge that left us with a 10.1 per cent annual budget deficit in 2010/11, masked with inane words about “smoothing out” over the cycle.

Of all the disciplines of state, economics is the most easily mastered. Every individual, household and corporation familiarises themselves with the basic rules early in their life. In the quest to maintain that governments are not bound to the law of balance that catches up with every other economic entity, the system itself has been debased. Money has been created from thin air to the extent that the next crash will itself be a result of attempting to stave off this present crash. What might have been a three-year cleansing process could now be a 20-year stagnation, largely thanks to men too clever to admit their mistakes.

Moreover, it is the attitude that Labour brought to public finances under Gordon ’n’ Ed that continues to poison the well. Labour has deliberately created a client state in this country, which recognises only the right to draw on the resources of others. With rhetoric about the rich, and a dozen years of rising payments to those who would not work, Balls has helped engender in this country a spiteful, petty-minded entitlement culture. Again, the connection between money and production has been severed. Again, the damage to our prospects as a nation is incalculable.

The Tories can and must take this fight to Balls in his home constituency. They must do it with persistence, honesty and a controlled rage. If the arrogance and spite that informs so much of Labour’s economic works cannot be exposed and ridiculed in Morley and Outwood, it won’t be anywhere.

This ought to have been the first seat filled, not one of the last, and it deserves the campaigning attention of the best and brightest the party has. And if the best and brightest don’t want to go? CCHQ, you know where to find me…